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Note: This thread is staff-only. You may request permission to reply from a staff member if you believe you will have productive input on the topic.
Introduction:
Hello. I am making this thread today to propose a revision to our off-site rules.
I would like to preface that, while this revision is obviously being made in the light of the recent controversy regarding Chasekilleen’s case on the Rules Violations Report Thread – a case in which I brought up some of the concerns with our off-site rules that I will express here – I do not wish for the discussion on this topic to be focused on how we should proceed with Chasekilleen’s case or for this discussion to be leveraged to attain a specific verdict in that case. This discussion is on the broader issues at play, and how we should address incidents of off-site misconduct in the future. With that out of the way, here is my proposal.
Foreword:
Before we can discuss the rules themselves, we need to address an underlying question – why do we have rules in the first place? Why don’t we just decide everything on a case-by-case basis, going against the rules when we feel they are wrong? This may seem pedantic, silly, or even offensive, but it’s quite important. I will leave this in a collapsible quote for the sake of not cluttering the OP, but I implore anyone intending to give an opinion on these proposals to read this to understand the lines of reasoning used thereafter.
The Problem:
Our current off-site rules regarding ‘irrelevant behaviour’ in section 2.7 of our Site Rules page state the following:
I would argue that, as has been analogised in many previous discussion on our off-site rules, there are three implicit principles these rules follow:
Interestingly, I don’t believe these three oft-cited principles completely encapsulate these rules, but I will touch on this later.
Ultimately, the intention behind these rules is obvious: we aren’t the internet police. We manage our own website and forum, and that’s that. Because we subscribe to that philosophy, the underlying principle behind all three aforementioned principles is this – ‘whatever an off-site act may be, if it is not illegal and it does not threaten the stability of our site, we shouldn’t take action on it’. I intend to argue, from the framework I have outlined above, that this principle is insufficient for our rules to be justified.
To illustrate this, let’s use a hypothetical example:
By our rules, we would have no basis on which to punish User B. User B would be permitted to continue engaging with the site and enabled to continue interacting with User A. However, I would argue this is in violation of the principle of preferability. A reasonable person, bound by these rules and with the awareness that they could have any position within this community (including the position of User A), would not want to partake in a community in which abused people are forced to interact with a person who has abused them in the past. It is a diminishment of one’s quality of life that far outweighs the diminishment of the quality of life of the abuser in the circumstance where this is punishable – as such, even if it means forgoing the liberty of interacting with someone if they were an abuser themselves (i.e.: if they were to have the position of User B), this would be the preferable alternative. The fact that our rules do not enable us to take action in such a circumstance shows there is an incongruence between our Site Rules and the principle of preferability, indicating that our site rules are unjust. This is the problem.
The Solution:
Now that we have established that the current state of the rules is the unpreferable alternative, we need to ask – what is the preferable alternative? To answer this, a good method is to explore why exactly a reasonable person would take moral objection to the former circumstance (the illustrative abusive relationship), or otherwise similar counterexamples to the state of our rules. And to this, I believe there are a couple of things we can point to.
1: In the former circumstance, User B’s interactions on-site – while not manifesting as direct threats – are just as harmful as direct threats would be to User A’s wellbeing. We obviously punish direct threats made by users on the wiki, and we can refer back to the principle of preferability to say why it should be that way. Because direct threats bring undue distress and reductions in wellbeing to people such that, even if we had to circumvent our own liberty to make threats ourselves, a reasonable person would choose to abide by that principle. The reason why we should take action against direct threats, then, is because the harm they cause is unjustifiable to the people subjected to it. When these interactions ultimately cause the same kind of harms as a direct threat, with the only difference being the content of the interaction (a morally arbitrary variable under the principle of preferability), we ultimately have not justified why we would consider one punishable and the other unpunishable.
2: Perhaps more pertinently, User B’s past off-site actions against User A implicate the potential for further harmful interactions in the future. Even if the relationship between User B and User A has ended, a sticking force comes with an imbalanced power dynamic – merely the fact that User B could leverage their interactions to cause further harms will likely instigate changes in User A’s behaviour out of a fear for their safety or wellbeing, potentially to the detriment of their physical or mental health. Referring to the principle of preferability, a reasonable person would not want to partake in a community in which they had cause to believe their safety and/or wellbeing was at risk due to the presence of another user, even if it meant they did not have the liberty to put the safety and/or wellbeing of others at risk. Importantly, this reasoning stands even if such cause does not ultimately manifest in directly harmful misconduct – the implicit threat of harmful misconduct is the ‘harm’ in itself.
If we understand that these are the kinds of circumstances in which taking action on the basis of off-site misconduct may be justified, this naturally leads into two further principles as an addendum:
As some of the more skeptical among you may find some rhetorical force in, these principles are tied back into their impacts for on-site interactions. The reasoning for this, following from what we have already explored, is simple: a matter which is performed off-site, and never concerns any of our users, cannot realistically result in an unjustifiable circumstance for any of our users, and therefore should not fall under our jurisdiction. Even if that action is something potentially objectionable, we still aren’t the internet police at the end of all this, and I am not suggesting we should be. Our concern is facilitating a community in which the rules are justifiable to our users, not with making other communities follow suit.
And remember how I said earlier that the three prior principles I noted in our current off-site rules don’t seem to fully encapsulate them? This would be a good time to elaborate on this by pointing to the oddball off-site rules we currently have.
In almost every discussion about the off-site rules, we question whether off-site behaviour is destabilising or illegal, and follow the rules from there. My question is – do these rules always constitute illegal or destabilising behaviour? Certainly, depending on context, they could constitute it. Impersonating a high-ranking staff member on a Discord server for the sake of defaming them could be destabilising. Depending on what the ‘harassment’ constitutes, and the laws surrounding harassment in your region (particularly, depending on how developed online safety laws are), that could be done in an illegal manner. But by the current phrasing of our rules, we are already in our rights – in unusually specific circumstances, at that – to punish misconduct that isn’t clearly illegal or destabilising. I find this odd, considering how often discussions on off-site misconduct revolve around whether the behaviour was illegal or destabilising, with action almost always being rejected if neither can be established.
I bring this up to illustrate that I believe we already have a (very limited) manifestation of the principles I have proposed above. When we frame the rules we already have in the understanding that we should punish off-site misconduct that could cause undue harm/distress or make people feel unsafe in on-site interactions, these oddball rules make a bit more sense. Harassment and impersonation, even done off-site, could reasonably cause harm, distress, or the perception of a dangerous environment for the affected user in on-site interactions with the perpetrator. This is ultimately a minor point in the grand discussion, but for what it’s worth, I believe we already have some inkling of these principles in our rules as they are currently written. What I am suggesting is not revolutionary - it is just more consistent. It is an expansion to encapsulate the full principles that justify the rules, rather than only having rules for very particular examples of those principles. And that is the solution to the problem.
The Proposal:
With all of this considered, what is my proposal for the exact change to the phrasing of the rules?
For reference, these are the current off-site rules:
And, with the aforementioned principles integrated (and with any redundancies created in the process removed), here is my proposal for the new phrasing of the rules:
While I believe the phrasing can speak for itself, I would like to offer clarity on the exact things these rules are/aren’t intended to encapsulate.
This proposal has been a very verbose way of justifying that concern in a concrete format, revising our rules to allow us to take necessary actions for the safety and wellbeing of our users, and to do so at minimal cost to the boundaries of our jurisdiction. I hope we will be able to reach a swift and reasonable resolution to this matter, and that any refinements or adjustments to these proposals can be handled comprehensively in our following discussion. Thank you for your time.
Introduction:
Hello. I am making this thread today to propose a revision to our off-site rules.
I would like to preface that, while this revision is obviously being made in the light of the recent controversy regarding Chasekilleen’s case on the Rules Violations Report Thread – a case in which I brought up some of the concerns with our off-site rules that I will express here – I do not wish for the discussion on this topic to be focused on how we should proceed with Chasekilleen’s case or for this discussion to be leveraged to attain a specific verdict in that case. This discussion is on the broader issues at play, and how we should address incidents of off-site misconduct in the future. With that out of the way, here is my proposal.
Foreword:
Before we can discuss the rules themselves, we need to address an underlying question – why do we have rules in the first place? Why don’t we just decide everything on a case-by-case basis, going against the rules when we feel they are wrong? This may seem pedantic, silly, or even offensive, but it’s quite important. I will leave this in a collapsible quote for the sake of not cluttering the OP, but I implore anyone intending to give an opinion on these proposals to read this to understand the lines of reasoning used thereafter.
Most often, when discussing matters where we should/shouldn’t punish a particular action, common reasoning is to say “It is against the rules, therefore we should punish it” or “It is not against the rules, therefore we shouldn’t punish it”. In essence, 'Kohlberg's conventional moral reasoning', for those familiar with the term. The implicit understanding is that the rules have some justified basis, whatever that basis may be, so actions which follow the rules are justified and actions that violate the rules are unjustified. This usually functions as a cohesive rationale, but it’s obviously completely unhelpful to this discussion. We aren’t questioning what is or is not against the rules – we are questioning what should be or shouldn’t be against the rules, which requires more complex, post-conventional reasoning about the justifiability of the basis of the rules themselves.
Almost everyone, whether they have put it into words or not, has an opinion on this – and almost everyone has a slightly different opinion on it. A truly comprehensive exploration of this question would require delving into moral philosophy to an extent that I am afraid would be a huge detraction from the intended topic of this thread. Rather than aiming to discuss this in depth, I merely want to offer one clear, unambiguous suggestion for the answer to this question that we can use as a framework – if only to ensure we are all on the same page.
My stance is this: rules are justified to the extent that they uphold universal principles that any reasonable individual, bound by those rules and with the understanding that they could possess the position of anyone bound by those rules, would agree are preferable to the alternative. In other words, our rules should be these principles, codified into a concrete format. For the sake of being less verbose in future references to this, I will refer to this standpoint as the ‘principle of preferability’.
This is somewhat obtuse, so let’s illustrate it with a practical example: the use of slurs. We do not allow the use of slurs towards other people on the wiki; it is against the rules. Why are they against the rules? Consider the fact that the alternative – a wiki where people are allowed to call each other slurs – would be substantially less preferable to a reasonable person than the version of the wiki we have now. A reasonable person would reject to partake in such a community because, even if it meant a restriction of their own natural liberties (in other words, a restriction of their ability to call other people slurs), they would prefer no one was able to call each other slurs to the alternative. Therefore, the use of slurs on the wiki are unjustifiable, and are made against the rules. Importantly, this means that the use of slurs isn’t unjustifiable simply because it is against the rules – it is unjustifiable because a reasonable person would willingly forgo their right to use slurs if it meant partaking in a community where people did not call each other slurs.
Those well-versed in moral and political philosophy may note that this stance is very similar to that of Rawls in the ‘Original Position’ thought experiment, where people have to decide what type of society they would choose to live in while having no concept of their ethnicity, gender, sexuality, socio-economic status, or otherwise. Variations of this notion – that rules are 'justified' to the people in a community if they follow universalised principles that all reasonable individuals would agree to if they had no concept of the position they would have in the community – is a common line of reasoning (if not the most common and well-regarded) in discussions on definitions of ‘justice’, and one I subscribe to. Hence why I advocate for this framework to understanding the implicit basis for our rules. Importantly, I do not want to needlessly expand on the totality of this stance; only the elements which are of relevance to our rules and our community, hence why the 'principle of preferability' is a simplified version of this notion.
The Problem:
Our current off-site rules regarding ‘irrelevant behaviour’ in section 2.7 of our Site Rules page state the following:
- Off-site behavior is usually irrelevant except in cases of:
- Actions that lead to the destabilization of the site (such as videos, forum posts, Discord chats, etc. that create drama), whether or not it was systematic. To determine what counts as destabilization of the site one should mostly look at the consequences of said act rather than the individual act itself.
- Threatening someone off-site, be it a threat of violence, hacking, doxxing, sexual harassment, etc.
- Harassment of users in their immediate surroundings (ex. Someone constantly messaging you with insulting comments via DMs or PMs)
- Engaging in online criminal activity (Not including piracy).
- Impersonating someone for malicious purposes.
I would argue that, as has been analogised in many previous discussion on our off-site rules, there are three implicit principles these rules follow:
1: Off-site misconduct is usually not in our jurisdiction, and therefore cannot be met with on-site punishments.
2: Off-site misconduct that is a threat to the stability of the wiki is in our jurisdiction, to the extent that we can punish these actions for their on-site impacts.
3: Cybercrime is not in our jurisdiction, but members found to have engaged in such activity must be removed out of legal obligation.
Interestingly, I don’t believe these three oft-cited principles completely encapsulate these rules, but I will touch on this later.
Ultimately, the intention behind these rules is obvious: we aren’t the internet police. We manage our own website and forum, and that’s that. Because we subscribe to that philosophy, the underlying principle behind all three aforementioned principles is this – ‘whatever an off-site act may be, if it is not illegal and it does not threaten the stability of our site, we shouldn’t take action on it’. I intend to argue, from the framework I have outlined above, that this principle is insufficient for our rules to be justified.
To illustrate this, let’s use a hypothetical example:
Two users have previously been involved in an abusive relationship. User A is someone who was abused by User B in the past. User A has been suffering from PTSD as a result of this abusive relationship, PTSD which significantly reduces their quality of life, and interactions with User B are triggers for this PTSD. User A joins the website, and later, User B joins the website. User B does not break any on-site rules in their interactions with User A (for instance, they do not directly harass User A). User B’s actions are ultimately acceptable on-site conduct in general, and the two no longer interact off-site. However, User B does persistently interact with User A on the website, and thereby knowingly triggers User A’s PTSD, lowering their quality of life substantially.
By our rules, we would have no basis on which to punish User B. User B would be permitted to continue engaging with the site and enabled to continue interacting with User A. However, I would argue this is in violation of the principle of preferability. A reasonable person, bound by these rules and with the awareness that they could have any position within this community (including the position of User A), would not want to partake in a community in which abused people are forced to interact with a person who has abused them in the past. It is a diminishment of one’s quality of life that far outweighs the diminishment of the quality of life of the abuser in the circumstance where this is punishable – as such, even if it means forgoing the liberty of interacting with someone if they were an abuser themselves (i.e.: if they were to have the position of User B), this would be the preferable alternative. The fact that our rules do not enable us to take action in such a circumstance shows there is an incongruence between our Site Rules and the principle of preferability, indicating that our site rules are unjust. This is the problem.
The Solution:
Now that we have established that the current state of the rules is the unpreferable alternative, we need to ask – what is the preferable alternative? To answer this, a good method is to explore why exactly a reasonable person would take moral objection to the former circumstance (the illustrative abusive relationship), or otherwise similar counterexamples to the state of our rules. And to this, I believe there are a couple of things we can point to.
1: In the former circumstance, User B’s interactions on-site – while not manifesting as direct threats – are just as harmful as direct threats would be to User A’s wellbeing. We obviously punish direct threats made by users on the wiki, and we can refer back to the principle of preferability to say why it should be that way. Because direct threats bring undue distress and reductions in wellbeing to people such that, even if we had to circumvent our own liberty to make threats ourselves, a reasonable person would choose to abide by that principle. The reason why we should take action against direct threats, then, is because the harm they cause is unjustifiable to the people subjected to it. When these interactions ultimately cause the same kind of harms as a direct threat, with the only difference being the content of the interaction (a morally arbitrary variable under the principle of preferability), we ultimately have not justified why we would consider one punishable and the other unpunishable.
2: Perhaps more pertinently, User B’s past off-site actions against User A implicate the potential for further harmful interactions in the future. Even if the relationship between User B and User A has ended, a sticking force comes with an imbalanced power dynamic – merely the fact that User B could leverage their interactions to cause further harms will likely instigate changes in User A’s behaviour out of a fear for their safety or wellbeing, potentially to the detriment of their physical or mental health. Referring to the principle of preferability, a reasonable person would not want to partake in a community in which they had cause to believe their safety and/or wellbeing was at risk due to the presence of another user, even if it meant they did not have the liberty to put the safety and/or wellbeing of others at risk. Importantly, this reasoning stands even if such cause does not ultimately manifest in directly harmful misconduct – the implicit threat of harmful misconduct is the ‘harm’ in itself.
If we understand that these are the kinds of circumstances in which taking action on the basis of off-site misconduct may be justified, this naturally leads into two further principles as an addendum:
1: Off-site misconduct is in our jurisdiction if it could reasonably cause undue harm and/or distress to a user in on-site interactions.
2: Off-site misconduct is in our jurisdiction if it could be reasonably construed as inconducive to the safety and/or wellbeing of a user, or a denomination of users, in on-site interactions.
As some of the more skeptical among you may find some rhetorical force in, these principles are tied back into their impacts for on-site interactions. The reasoning for this, following from what we have already explored, is simple: a matter which is performed off-site, and never concerns any of our users, cannot realistically result in an unjustifiable circumstance for any of our users, and therefore should not fall under our jurisdiction. Even if that action is something potentially objectionable, we still aren’t the internet police at the end of all this, and I am not suggesting we should be. Our concern is facilitating a community in which the rules are justifiable to our users, not with making other communities follow suit.
And remember how I said earlier that the three prior principles I noted in our current off-site rules don’t seem to fully encapsulate them? This would be a good time to elaborate on this by pointing to the oddball off-site rules we currently have.
- Harassment of users in their immediate surroundings (ex. Someone constantly messaging you with insulting comments via DMs or PMs)
- Impersonating someone for malicious purposes.
In almost every discussion about the off-site rules, we question whether off-site behaviour is destabilising or illegal, and follow the rules from there. My question is – do these rules always constitute illegal or destabilising behaviour? Certainly, depending on context, they could constitute it. Impersonating a high-ranking staff member on a Discord server for the sake of defaming them could be destabilising. Depending on what the ‘harassment’ constitutes, and the laws surrounding harassment in your region (particularly, depending on how developed online safety laws are), that could be done in an illegal manner. But by the current phrasing of our rules, we are already in our rights – in unusually specific circumstances, at that – to punish misconduct that isn’t clearly illegal or destabilising. I find this odd, considering how often discussions on off-site misconduct revolve around whether the behaviour was illegal or destabilising, with action almost always being rejected if neither can be established.
I bring this up to illustrate that I believe we already have a (very limited) manifestation of the principles I have proposed above. When we frame the rules we already have in the understanding that we should punish off-site misconduct that could cause undue harm/distress or make people feel unsafe in on-site interactions, these oddball rules make a bit more sense. Harassment and impersonation, even done off-site, could reasonably cause harm, distress, or the perception of a dangerous environment for the affected user in on-site interactions with the perpetrator. This is ultimately a minor point in the grand discussion, but for what it’s worth, I believe we already have some inkling of these principles in our rules as they are currently written. What I am suggesting is not revolutionary - it is just more consistent. It is an expansion to encapsulate the full principles that justify the rules, rather than only having rules for very particular examples of those principles. And that is the solution to the problem.
The Proposal:
With all of this considered, what is my proposal for the exact change to the phrasing of the rules?
For reference, these are the current off-site rules:
- Off-site behavior is usually irrelevant except in cases of:
- Actions that lead to the destabilization of the site (such as videos, forum posts, Discord chats, etc. that create drama), whether or not it was systematic. To determine what counts as destabilization of the site one should mostly look at the consequences of said act rather than the individual act itself.
- Threatening someone off-site, be it a threat of violence, hacking, doxxing, sexual harassment, etc.
- Harassment of users in their immediate surroundings (ex. Someone constantly messaging you with insulting comments via DMs or PMs)
- Engaging in online criminal activity (Not including piracy).
- Impersonating someone for malicious purposes.
And, with the aforementioned principles integrated (and with any redundancies created in the process removed), here is my proposal for the new phrasing of the rules:
- Off-site behavior is usually irrelevant except in cases of:
- Actions that lead to the destabilization of the site (such as videos, forum posts, Discord chats, etc. that create drama), whether or not it was systematic. To determine what counts as destabilization of the site one should mostly look at the consequences of said act rather than the individual act itself.
- Actions taken against another user off-site of such a nature that could reasonably cause undue harm and/or distress for the other user in on-site interactions. This includes, but is not limited to: harassment, threats of violence or similar harmful actions, unsolicited sexual misconduct, impersonation, hacking, and doxing.
- Actions made off-site that could be reasonably construed as inconducive to the safety and/or wellbeing of a user, or a denomination of users, in on-site interactions. This includes, but is not limited to: threats directed towards particular demographics (i.e.: racial, gendered, sexual, and/or religiously motivated threats to commit violent acts), obscenities of an implicative nature (i.e.: hate speech, sexual comments towards minors), and involvement with known hate groups.
- Engaging in online criminal activity (Not including piracy).
While I believe the phrasing can speak for itself, I would like to offer clarity on the exact things these rules are/aren’t intended to encapsulate.
- These rules are intended to encapsulate instances in which actions by a user off-site could cause undue harm/distress to another user in on-site interactions, such as targeted bullying of a user or non-consensual, sexually-connotated interactions. These rules aren’t intended to encapsulate instances of off-site bantering/teasing of a trivial or friendly nature, respectful criticisms, or feuds between friends.
- These rules are intended to encapsulate instances in which actions by a user off-site could be reasonably construed as inconducive to the safety/wellbeing of another user, such as threatening violence against someone on the basis of their race, stating intention to mistreat a particular religious group, or partaking in a known LGBT hate group. These rules aren’t intended to encapsulate instances of saying the n-word in a casual server on Discord, partaking in taboo fetishes in a wholly private and consensual environment, or being a critic of a particular group of people with no harmful intentions towards them.
This proposal has been a very verbose way of justifying that concern in a concrete format, revising our rules to allow us to take necessary actions for the safety and wellbeing of our users, and to do so at minimal cost to the boundaries of our jurisdiction. I hope we will be able to reach a swift and reasonable resolution to this matter, and that any refinements or adjustments to these proposals can be handled comprehensively in our following discussion. Thank you for your time.